The invention is directed to a crop harvesting machine that comprises a machine body and a discharge spout attached to the machine body for over loading crop via a crop stream to a trailer, requiring that the crop stream be guided into a receiving area of the trailer, which mostly is defined by an upper, open side of the trailer. A spout drive arrangement is assigned to the discharge spout such that the discharge spout is displaced relative to the machine body by transmitting drive commands to the discharge spout drive arrangement.
It is a challenging task to constantly align the discharge spout, such that the resulting crop stream does not miss the receiving area of the trailer. This is particularly true for the case that the crop harvesting machine is a self-propelled machine, which is followed by a combination of a tractor and a trailer.
DE 10 2014 108 449 A1, discloses an electronic spout control which is designed for generating drive commands to the discharge spout drive arrangement for automatically guiding the crop stream to a target hit point at the trailer. For this, a first sensor arrangement is provided, which generates sensor information by optically identifying a reference feature at the trailer and by detecting the position of this reference feature. Also, the known crop harvesting machine is provided with numerous sensors, for example, acceleration sensors, gyroscopes or the like, which seem to be provided for guiding the harvesting machine such.
Any change in driving direction puts a challenge to the automatic guidance of the discharge spout, as even small curves have a large impact on the actual hit point of the crop stream. The known crop harvesting machine does not approach this challenge at all, such that its dynamic behavior of the spout control in view of a change in the driving direction is expected to be suboptimal.